2016 CITI OPEN: WRAP UP AND TENNISFILES PODCAST

So long, 2016 Citi Open:  you came and went too soon, but it was well worth the wait.  Here's episode 26 of Tennis Files podcast, by Mehrbad Iranshad.  It's always a pleasure talking tennis with him, and I hope you enjoy it too.


If you haven't already, and you play (or just love) tennis , I really encourage you to have a look at Tennis Files by Mehrban Iranshad  The information in it is really comprehensive:  from technique, to tactics, to fitness, to game planning:  you name it, he's got it, and he doesn't rest on his laurels - there's always something to go back for and have another look.

The topics and guests on his podcasts are fantastic:  from juniors hoping to make the jump, to professionals who ply their trade, to former gladiators reminiscing about their days on tour.  And there's the stuff about improving your game, from picking the right strings, to the right coach, to the top 7 reasons you lose a tennis match...like I said, it's comprehensive.

Well, once again thanks to everyone at the Citi Open for a great year, to my colleagues who were once again great to be around, to the players for making the spectacle, and (my fellow) fans for making it possible.

See you in 2017!

2016 CITI OPEN FINAL: THE AIR UP THERE

Let's be honest - that started out the worst final I've ever seen.  Not just at the Citi Open, mind you.  Even Newport had some agonizing misses, friendly/ruthless netcords, and what passes for moments of intrigue in any match featuring the long arm of the Croatian law.  But in the beginning, there was almost none of that today.  The rhythmic clapping that entreats a favored gladiator to make the next point count, made its first appearance, rather apathetically it must be added, upon Monfils' evening the score on Karlovic's serve for the first time...at 15-15.  There were three break points averted in the last game of the first set, but the hand held fans waddled more energetically than the hands clapped after each of them was disposed of in depressingly similar fashion.

In fact the writing seemed to be on the wall in the very first game of the match.  Despite his much ballyhooed improved serve, which elicited 42 aces in 4 matches, Monfils struggled to hold his serve in the face of returns more befitting Djokovic than Karlovic, and a spring in his step that would have made Dolgopolov proud.  It was hard to tell on his 6'11 frame, but I promise you it was there.  Karlovic on the other hand sailed through his first 5 service games hitting more aces than faults, an ominous statistic speaking to both his efficiency and Monfils' profligacy.  In the end both translated into a first set that was about as dramatic as a bullfighter standing in the middle of the ring with an elephant gun.

There was a kind of resignation in Monfils, even as he himself began drumming aces in the second set.  It was almost as if he, a participant in this macabre exercise in Japanese pantomime, resented being a part of it.  Serving his 3rd ace of the game to close out the 6th game with just one point dropped on a running forehand pass up the line from Karlovic, he appeared to initiate a jig of celebration...but as he looked down to find his feet, it was evident that he had merely tripped over himself.  Karlovic, on the other hand, was full of merriment, as he gracelessly took the hot air right out of the stadium time after time, with irritating examples of the full repertoire of shots he possesses: drop volleys, inside in forehand approaches, slice returns landing 6 inches from the base and side lines.

In fact, one could argue that the better he played, the more the sanguine spectators, looking down their noses at the combattants like the Plebeians at the Colosseum, rooted against him.  One almost began to wonder if there wasn't something more philosophical in the desire to see Monfils emerge victorious from this encounter, as he had in fact, been the worse player for the better part of an hour and 1 and 15 minutes.  But the match turned on two things that both energized Monfils, and seemed to demoralize Karlovic.  

Karlovic left a half volley short in the court, but no where near short enough to be out of range of his majestic moving rival.  Monfils, sensing the moment, charged forward, slid into a frying pan forehand aimed ruthlessly at the trunk of his rival, and hit the mark in more ways than one.

Soon, the thunderbolts began to miss their mark.  Whereas previously he had been quite accurate, an underrated quality of his serve, when he served for the set at 5-4, having broken Monfils in the previous game, he began to rely on the second serve, which was not up to the task.  Furthermore, Monfils, plundering away under the assumption that something had to give, began putting those returns in challenging positions, forcing Karlovic to both loom and move with the grace of a gazelle - only one of which he was able to pull off.  After sending a forehand volley long on the last of 3 break points, off of a dying return scarcely framed by his flamboyant french foe, the trophy suddenly appeared to be just a little bit further from his grasp.

In the tie-break the same technique persisted.  Playing a kind of classic grass-court return game, dropping balls at the lumbering behemoth's feet, rather than trying to put them past him, while Karlovic struggled to maintain his efficiency, after another low forehand volley in the net, the roar from the crowd ushered in the realization that Monfils had persevered and a 3rd set was to be played.

The third set began with a return to form on Karlovic's serve, while yet another wobble in Monfils' was not enough to allow the Croatian giant to break.  That's when the rhythm (or lack thereof) appeared to get him.  A pair of first serves missed, and an overhead in the net, drew a kind of startled gasp from the crowd:  a bit like the moment in Rocky IV when Drago is cut.  Nobody could believe that the mountain had been traversed by that fuzzy yellow ball, and a genuine belief that another break (the only breaks of serve he's suffered at the 2016 Citi Open) was on the cards.  And Karlovic appeared to be wilting in the heat - already taking his time in between points, he appeared to do it moreso now that he had been broken, while the Frenchman accelerated through his games with aplombe.

The bending, the mid-court pick-ups, the stretch returns and the angled volleys began to take their toll on Karlovic.  Irritated when the towels weren't made immediately available by the ball kids, Karlovic seemed to play more and more first balls (off the return) from beyond the service line.  For a quality serve and volleyer, that is part and parcel of plying one's trade moving forward.  But for Karlovic, the effects of the burden began to seep into almost everything he did, and he began to do everything just a little bit worse.  The break, when it came, met with rapturous applause from the francophile audience, seemed a fait accompli, more than an accomplishment.  Nevertheless, once and for all, the match had turned in the Frenchman's favor.

Monfis on the other hand went from that all too familiar Gallic shrug to the battle cry of a Zulu warrior.  No longer content with pumping himself up, he moved on to the crowd, entreating them to entreat him to higher heights.  He even fortified himself in between serves, such was the evidence of his increased sense of urgency.  His serve, slower in the third set than it had been in the second, was more accurate, causing Karlovic to miss the return more frequently, and taking enormous pressure off of himself and, like Putin on a judo mat, rebounding it squarely on his rival.

Of course Karlovic just...keeps...coming.  And despite being down a break in the 8th game of the final set, he opened the game with two outstanding volley winners to put Monfils under scoreboard pressure, which might have been irresistible given the serve that would certainly have awaited him had he lost his.  But he finished the game with 4 outstanding serves that Karlovic alternately pulled out of and over hit to the delight of those now in full throated anticipation of a French victory.  Karlovic did his best to fend off the energized frenchman - standing (very) tall (indeed) on another mid court pick up that landed tantalizingly short in the court.  Monfils again went for the jugular, but not nearly dispassionately enough, and Karlovic was able to fend off the pancake with a reaction volley to the open court.  Two points later, he survived the game to make one last stand.

Monfils began uncertainly, with a double-fault into the net - never a good sign of nerves.  But he followed it up with a brave sneak attack off a high looping forehand up the line to Karlovic's backhand which he sliced tamely into the net.  Another missed 1st serve in the deuce court on the 3rd point was rectified this time by a 2nd serve ace wide.  The penultimate point was cagey, with Monfils stretching the rally out before drawing Karlovic into a clumsy approach, which he passed with a backhand up the line.  The match ended, ironically if only considering the source, with an authoritative ace up the T.

To the delight of the crowd, the popular Frenchman prevailed where he could have so readily taken the easy way out.  While Karlovic, attended briefly by the physio as he awaited his runner-up prize, was resigned to his role today as the sacrificial lamb.

2016 FINAL THOUGHTS: A GAEL FORCE WIND AT HIS BACK...AND IN HIS FACE

History hates nothing more than a crown unworn, a throne unseated, a title unearned.  The history of Gael Monfils is no different.  In 2004, he shocked the French tennisocracy by winning first 3 of the 4 junior majors, and stood on the precipice of doing something that hadn't been done since Stefan Edberg won the very first junior calendar grand slam of the open era in 1983.  He was the pearl that French tennis had awaited for years.  Though other Gallic juniors like Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Richard Gasquet had been more heavily touted, it was Monfils, formerly bespectacled, spindly and awkward, that emerged as the closest thing, to a sure thing, to end the French drought at the professional majors.  And though the strength of his game resembled the same qualities that characterize his professional exploits (the super hero speed and stretching, the fantastical trick shots, the unadulterated athleticism) there would have been those who still wondered if this weren't another mirage in the, then 20 year desert, of french men's tennis.

Those doubts, whispered by the most pessimistic, weren't doused by his quarterfinal loss of a match, and a shot at history, in the Boys Singles draw of the 2004 US Open:  in fact they were given a loud and undeniable voice.  His absence from the final, contested by Sergiy Stahkovsky and Andy Murray, a pair who would carry on a different kind of tete a tete this year following Indian Wells, was all but forgotten when he began a full time career on the ATP tour.  Launching himself into the top 50 with victories at 2 challengers and a full ATP event in Sopot, he was overshadowed only by the player that French tennistas have always truly believed to be the rightful heir to the legacy of Les Mousquetaires.  In fact Gasquet may have done him a favor by beating Roger Federer in Monte Carlo, putting the "bleu, blanc et rouge" bullseye at Roland Garros squarely on his back, where it didn't belong.  Monfils has actually had the most consistent results of all his contemporary countrymen at their home major, (if not the best, with Tsonga reaching one more semifinal).

But since that early promise, despite remaining one of, if not the most, athletic player(s) in the game today, and the evolution of the game making raw athleticism more and more of a common trait (if not distinguishing), Monfils has not translated that into commensurate success at the highest echelons of the game.  I have always suspected that while every other part of his body screams exceptional, the most critical tools in his tennis kit remain curiously ordinary:  his hands.  While Simon uses his to swash, Gasquet uses his to swashbuckle and Tsonga uses his to simply buckle, Monfils' hands, hardly the most sophisticated in the world, form the basis of little more than a human backboard.  No shot seems out of his reach, unless he decides otherwise, and it's a considerable reach.

But the hands have failed him from time to time:  the inability to handle the short slice, the tendency to receded further and further into the backcourt, and the almost psychological dependence on his athleticism to entertain (and not necessarily to win), have all belied the very profligacy of talent that coaches and the tennis punditry has bemoaned.  Darren Cahill once claimed that Monfils would, from time to time, skip a (second and) afternoon practice with his coach, Roger Rasheed, claiming he need a rest, only to find him later in his room hotel room hootin' and hollerin' while working up a sweat playing FIFA soccer on the playstation.  So perhaps something within him realized that there was a limit to how far he needed to develop himself physically (Rasheed's specialty), when the most critical tool available to him (his hands) remained unaddressed.

Maybe he knew something that we didn't?

This week, after having hired his Swedish coach Mikael Tillstrom in October of last year, worked on simplifying his game, and more specifically the technique on his serve, the Gael Monfils taking the court today in his second successive final (if 5 years after the first), has shorn his infamous locks, and some of the more elaborate machinations that have frustrated his least loyal fans.  The gale force wind at his back may be the new and improved serve, imperceptibly more rhythmic, but palpably more effective, has elicited only 2/3rd as many aces (42) as his infamous serving opponent (66).  He will need all the free points he can get to reduce his burden of proof that Karlovic might not get through a WTA field would it were not for that monstrosity of a first serve.

The jury is not out on either of their careers today, but the perceived quality of the final, will be largely dependent on the extent to which an entertainer can get down to business and mitigate the reputation (at least) of a 5-19 record in ATP finals.

THANK YOU CITI OPEN: JOHN HARRIS

I picked up my press pass at the Citi Open yesterday, and as always, I just couldn't resist the opportunity to get a sneak preview of the players that will make this the place to be for any self-respecting tennis enthusiast in the Washington, DC area over the next 10 days.  The joy of coming to this tournament, for me, is as much in watching the players practice, as it is watching the matches, which can go so quickly if one of the two combattants fails to play his part.  Sure enough, having ambled over to the Grandstand court, I encountered Caroline Wozniacki working out with her father, who like Richard Williams before him, has overcome the paucity of any true tennis pedigree of his own, to turn his daughter into one of the best players in the world.  Among other things, he had her working on pattern play, service return and first strike shot placement, and the old "hit the can" with your serve routine - only the can this time was a white towel (she hit it once, by the way).  Kind of makes you wonder what the "professional" coaches are doing, but I digress.

Following their workout, the court was taken over by Daniel Evans, his coach, and the coach-less Grigor Dimitrov.  Now this was fun to watch:  as an admirer and exponent of the 1-handed backhand, here I had two of the most aesthetically appealing in the game to watch.  Evans, having just come off being manhandled by one Roger Federer at Wimbledon in the 3rd round, actually appeared to be a little off his game, by my count committing about 3 times as many unforced errors as his partner for the day.  What struck me about their hit, which became fairly intense within the first 10 minutes, was the difference between talent and technique, and what the combination of the two allows a player to do that is beyond one who clearly has one but is relatively lacking in the other.

Evans has, by all accounts, exceptional hand-eye coordination and very good hands - he's very talented.  He can do things with a racquet that is beyond your average hacker...including professional hackers.  And from time to time, he can go nuclear with that forehand of his, in a way that makes the racquet look more like a frying pan as his hands come through the point of contact.  But it comes at a cost, when the timing required to pull this off escapes him, he is as likely to hit the back fence as the baseline.  More often than not, if you train your eye on his follow through, rather than the ball, you can see that he's hitting off his back foot.  Dimitrov, on the other hand, hits every forehand in front of his body with good weight transfer from the back foot to the front.  He stays down on the stroke, which allows him to hit with more spin, net clearance, and depth - hence the relatively low frequency of unforced errors.  They went through the standard warm-up cycle, and finished playing a 7-point tie break that Dimitrov won ironically hitting two aces wide in the ad court, after missing that serve in the warm up about 7 times in a row.  I guess practice really does make perfect.

It's worth mentioning that while Evans exited stage left with his coach after an hour, Dimitrov played another hour with another player (whose name escapes me and Leon Vessels) who does not appear to be in the tournament, but seems to be a popular hitting partner at this venue.  Last year I saw him hitting with a number of players, men and women, and this year, after sparring with Dimitrov, he moved to the stadium to hit with a WTA player, and ironically was asked by observing children for autographs, while they ignored his ignominious partner.  Dimitrov, toiling in anonymity, seemed to enjoy himself, as he always does when on the court, belied the presumed depression one might expect from a player whose star has fallen so far in the last couple of years. After a meteoric rise to the top 10 in 2014, coming within a rat's ass of making the O2, and playing a Wimbledon semi-final, this year he found himself unseeded and vanquished in the 3rd round by 2-time NCAA champion American Steve Johnson.  I find Dimitrov's committment and pure joy at being on the court to be a good sign that my prediction, that he will win a major at some point in his career, to still be well within his reach.

During the practice with Evans, Dimitrov noted that the kick serve in the North end of the Grandstand court bites a hell of a lot more than the other courts, and according to him, did him no favors last year when he lost to Johnson following two rain delays and two court changes.  The high American('s) twist serve to the single handed backhand was more than he could handle, and if he meets the Trojan man this year, on that court, he will have to figure out a way to neutralize that serve as a weapon, lest he meet the same fate.

I also had a chance to watch Alexander Zverev hit with Gael Monfils on the stadium court, where I was really impressed by the liquid power of the spindly German (by way of Russia) - a last minute wild-card entrant into the field after being dumped out of a home tournament in Hamburg.  There's just no substitute for being able to inject pace into the rally at any given moment, and I observed the rhythm in their rallies to be decidedly in his favor by something like a 2-3 margin (two counts for his shot to reach Monfils, 3 counts for those of the Frenchman to reach him).  Monfils was more frequently the player hitting late in their exchanges, which will do nothing to turnaround what has been a less than inspiring 2016 for him.

As usual, it's impossible to know whether he will be more focused on thrilling the crowd than winning, but I plan to make a special visit to his first match.  However, if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on Zverev to go further in the tournament and/or win it all, if he can overcome the fatigue he must be feeling having played two warm up tournaments before Wimbledon, making the quarterfinal before getting it handed to him by absent the number 1 seed here at the Citi Open Thomas Berdych and then a warm-down event in his native Germany on clay.

Finally, I watched a practice with Irina Falconi, her second in succession, having been (wo)manhandled in a practice set by Francoise Abanda (the Canadian siren with gams like a daddy-long legs, who's been given a wild-card into the qualifying tournament) against American Christina McHale.  McHale, the New Jersey native who waddles around the court like a long-legged penguin, but hits one of the easiest and cleanest forehands in the women's tour, is a dark-horse to go deep here as well.  Her modern forehand, produced with the racquet head remaining on the right side of her profile, generating torque and deceptive acceleration as it catches up with her hands at the point of contact, is not the best athlete in the draw, but following her very competitive encounter with Serena Williams at SW19, appears to be playing well, fit as a fiddle and ready to win her first WTA title just as her compatriot Sloane Stephens did here last year.

As I watched these two going through their paces, an older gentleman quietly ambled over in my direction and asked, as though soliciting a secret, if McHale was the woman who did so well against Serena Williams at Wimbledon this year.  I confirmed as much, and this initiated a conversation about tennis in general that surprised me in so more ways that one.  He noted that a girl on the far court looked about 12 years old, and remarked how young the players were able to start today, and how different it was versus past eras, because of the equipment.  He asked me how long I'd been coming to the tournament, and I proudly told him 30+ years, to which he replied that he'd been there since the beginning.

Since the beginning?  The 1969 beginning?

It turned out the gentleman was none other than the John Harris, who co-founded the tournament with Donald Dell (and Steve Potts) all those years ago.  Honestly, my knees buckled.  I couldn't help myself, and asked him a series of questions that he patiently answered.  The best match he'd ever seen?  The consolation match in 1971 between a 19-year old Jimmy Connors and a 20-year old Eddie Dibbs, which he said almost nobody saw, but was better than the final between Ken Rosewall and Marty Riessen.  Rosewall, at the time of his victory in 1971, was the reigning US Open champion, having defeated Tony Roche at Forest Hills the year before. But he didn't defend his title due to the growing conflict between the WCT and the ILTF, which centered around the struggle for control over the conditions of who entered the tournament and who didn't.  Despite the Cold War at the dawn of the open era, he was free to take the title in DC, rather routinely, over his veteran American opponent.

All this was news to me.

And to the question of why the surface of clay was chosen for this tournament, preceding the US Open (which at the time was played on grass) Harris explained that in those days, the summer US circuit consisted of actually two sub-circuits. The clay court series in places like Cincinnatti, Indianapolis and Chicago, that they wanted to be a part of to facilitate a better field of players.  Once the summer US clay court season had concluded, the focus moved on to grass, with tournaments in Newport, Boston and finally culimnating at Forest Hills.  In fact, the brief interlude of the US Open switching to clay from 1975 to 1977 had essentially spelled the deathknell of the summer US grass court season, which had been in place for some 85 years, before all the tournaments in the US transitioned to hard courts.

He said that he had been a collegiate and amateur player himself, but that he had never been able to effectively compete against Donald Dell, who was himself a 3-time all American at Yale, and NCAA finalist in 1959.  He said that as good as Dell was, Arthur Ashe was on another level as a player, something that is frequently forgotten about the man...a testament to the exceptional human being that he was, and humanitarian that he became.  

Speaking further about Ashe, who along with Harris and Dell had years before cooked up the notion of an integrated tournament in the nation's Capitol, Harris sat on the Men's Professional Tennis Council representing the US tournaments, alongside him as he represented the players, when he first heard of the Williams sisters.  Harris, with great humility, admitted to me that he didn't think the girls had a chance, not because of their ability (which was obvious) but because their father had prevented them from playing the standard US junior tennis circuit.  After proclaiming as much to Ashe, Ashe himself (who died 6 years before Serena won the US Open in 1999) predicted that both of them would be world champions and would be the first of many from the black American community if the USTA played their cards right.  Sadly it hasn't, which Harris admitted had never been the intention of the WTEF, which owns and operates the Citi Open, and donates nearly every penny to local education, and not necessarily the development of tennis champions.

Speaking of the Williams sisters, Harris told me a story of how he had stayed down the hall from the same hotel as the Williams sisters in 1998 in Australia.  He knew then that the Williams' parents were special because the mother, Oracene, would get up at 7:00am every morning to do the laundry. Why?  Because Venus didn't have any sponsors that would provide her with new clothes to wear before every match; so the depth of humility and commitment was evident. One can understand their persistent skepticism of the tennis establishment, given that in 1998 they still couldn't find a single clothing sponsor that could be bothered to throw some free clothes in the direction of a 17-year old girl who had already reached #22 in the world and had made the final at Sydney a week before one of the 4 biggest tournaments in the world.

How things have changed since.

It was an honor and a pleasure to make the acquaintance of a man who, unwittingly, is one of the reasons that I fell in love with tennis.  This tournament was the first time I'd seen tennis played in person by professionals, and ever since has been my Mecca for 33 years, the place I come to fall in love with the game all over again, and will continue to as long as air fills my lungs.

For this, and for so much more I say, thank you John Harris.

ADDENDUM:  Dimitrov's hitting partner, and the man whose autograph had been sought by those kids watching hit in the stadium court was Leon Vessels, whose history with the Citi Open is as curious as it is inspiring.  

YOU KNOW THE TENNIS WORLD HAS LOST ITS MIND WHEN...

...Henri Leconte is the bearer of advice and counsel on professionalism, among other kibbles and bits of wisdom.  This is apropos of nothing, but in case you missed it, in this clip, Leconte appears to put the squeeze on the current crop of underachieving French tennis professionals in their quest to right the wrongs of 2014 and win the Davis Cup that they seemed poised to do against the Swiss...on clay...in France.

Ironically, he was somewhat goaded into doing so by Gasquet (one of the said fruits of French tennis' labor) who tells Leconte, who was at first reticent to name names, to do just that.  I think it was an attempt to get him to shut up, but instead, Leconte being Leconte, he wound up goading him into calling out Monfils!  I mean with friends like that, who needs enemies?

This is also ironic on another level - Leconte was also considered to be way too talented not to win a major in his day, and wasn't exactly the fittest or most committed player in history.  Nobody got more out of their talent in the history of tennis than Leconte, because it sure serbert didn't come from time spent running the Swiss hills (where it seems so many french tennis players choose to live, but I digress).  But his insane performance in Lyon in 1991, defeating Sampras, then winning the doubles with Forget (giving France a 2-1 lead) has essentially washed away his "sins" at Roland Garros.

Of course, for some fans of his (myself included), there was Henri and...well everyone else....

He was even given a heroe's sending off at Roland Garros after having sustained one of the most humiliating losses of his career in the final there in 1988, where he famously hoped the French public now "understand, a bit, my game," which of course they did not and excoriated him (immediately) for entreating them to.  The tennis world, like the world in its entirety, is round, and it seems we've come all the way around to treating Leconte like a wiseman, rather than the "genius from the elbow down" he used to be.

  

So now he espouses the value of hard work and commitment in the Davis Cup context, when he himself was no gym rat.  Let's face it - in his best physical form, he still had saggy breasts pecs and legs that looked more like they belonged under an accountant's desk, than on a tennis court.  

Well, I mean, I shouldn't judge...bean counters play tennis too!  It's a mad mad world indeed...